Chains and Memory (20 page)

Better get used to it,
I thought grimly.
You stopped being a child when the Otherworld came back.

Masangga was waiting for my brain to start working again. “You don't need to worry,” I said dully. “I—I'll—” Gods, I did
not
want to be discussing such things with this woman. “It's taken care of.”

She let me leave it at that, which was the first bit of mercy she'd shown this entire time. “Then I believe we are done,” she said. “I will be in touch regarding the issue of training.”

“Yeah. Sure.” I rose and left without saying goodbye.

Outside in the sun, I stood and let people flow around me on the sidewalk. I should wait until we were face-to-face, but this would eat at me for the rest of the day if I stalled. I walked partway down an alley, pulled out my port, and called Julian.

He answered promptly, and whatever my image looked like in the video, it transformed curiosity to concern on the spot. “Are you okay? What happened in the meeting?”

“I'm Kimberly Argant-Dubois Fiain now,” I said inanely, as if that were the actual reason I'd called. “At least, I will be once the paperwork goes through. And they want to send me to Pennsylvania for training, but I told them to go to hell. Or to train me here, which would probably be better.” I was rambling, but Julian knew to let me keep going until I got to the point. “She also . . . told me about children.”

His expression went blank. It wasn't Julian trying to hide anything from me; this was a deeper reflex, the one that kicked in when something really threw him.
Self-control,
I thought,
above all.
“Oh,” he said quietly. And then, after a moment, “I should have told you. I didn't think . . .”

“You figured I was on birth control,” I said. I'd gotten an IUD when I was fourteen. My mother believed in health, and in playing it safe.

Julian said, “I knew I was sterile.”

So he
had
been sterilized. Probably right before he came to Welton; I knew he'd been eighteen at the start of our freshman year, and presumably he had to be a legal adult before the procedure could happen. The next question came out before I could think about it twice. “Was that your choice?”

“Yes,” he said, without hesitation.

I believed him . . . but I couldn't help wondering. Given the way wilders were raised, the atmosphere of strict self-control—which was not far from strict obedience to authority—how many of their choices were really made freely?

My silence must have spoken all on its own. Julian added, “There was no reason not to. I didn't know when, or if, I would find someone I could trust enough to get close to—but I knew I didn't want to hurt them. And there's really no other outcome for us.”

I slumped against the wall separating the alley from the neighboring parking lot and blew out a slow breath. “I guess that makes sense.”

“I'm sorry,” Julian said, quietly enough that I could barely hear him over the rattle of a bus going by. “You've already been put through so much. I shouldn't have left you to find this out from some bureaucrat.”

I bit down hard on the impulse to say,
No, you shouldn't have.
How often did he even think about it? From his perspective, the problem was taken care of. He never had to worry about it again. I couldn't blame him for not telling me, not really. As for whether
I
would do anything more . . . I shoved the thought from my mind. The IUD was good for my health in general; that was enough for now.

I had enough other goddamned things to worry about.

~

Ramos had left a message for me while I was in the hospital. I couldn't bring myself to listen to it for days, because I knew what it was going to say.

After I finally scraped up the courage to face it, I called her office. Eduardo put me through immediately, which was both flattering and a bad sign. Ramos' face was set in an expression of sympathy, but of course it would be. She was a politician. She had practice with breaking unpleasant news to people.

“I got your message,” I said. “You're going to drop my section from the bill?”

Clearly she'd been planning some kind of introductory spiel, a lead-in that would let her soften the blow, but I'd headed it off at the pass. She simply said, “It's already done. I know it doesn't feel like it, Kim, but this is the best course of action.”

My jaw ached from clenching. I'd waited until I thought I could have this conversation calmly, but maybe I'd been optimistic in my judgment. “All it does is leave us at square one. No, worse than that—square zero. Because according to the Eleventh Circuit judge, the existing law covers people like me. And that's going to be cited as precedent for anybody who ends up in the same boat.”

“It's precedent, but it can be overturned,” Ramos said. “The Supreme Court didn't uphold the ruling; they punted. Which leaves them room to rule differently at some point down the road. That's a lot better than them deciding to hear your case, and ruling against you.”

“But you could have made the whole thing moot.”

She sighed and propped her elbows on her desk, her chin on her folded hands. “At a cost. Kim, the process of reconciling bills in conference is an enormous game of horse-trading. The other side offers to give up A if we give them B, and we offer C in exchange for D. The question has always been what we would have to give up to get you written out of the current system. Now that you've been shielded, most of my colleagues see the potential gain as close to nil. Fighting for this has become all cost, no benefit—at least in their eyes. Whereas if we gave it up, we could get something else we needed.”

“No benefit,” I said, my voice stony. “Right. I suppose it looks that way, when you're not the one who's had the core of your soul ripped away.”

Ramos flinched. I didn't think it was staged, and I couldn't have hit her empathically at this distance even if I hadn't been gutted; she genuinely did regret how things had fallen out. “I haven't given up, Kim. We may very well have better odds proposing this as a stand-alone bit of legislation, rather than trying to fold it into a monster omnibus like the Otherworld Act.”

It was the closest thing I had to hope, so I clung to it. “Then no half measures, right? You'll get comprehensive reform. A mandate to remove the shield from all adult wilders.”

“We'll see what we can do. Any such thing would need to be developed in consultation with DSPA leaders, of course . . .”

She kept talking after that, but I more or less stopped listening. Gutted, talking to a baseline over a video call, I had nothing to go on but body language—and now that I was learning to pay attention, it told me things I didn't want to know.

That moment of honest emotion was gone. The cautious enthusiasm Ramos showed now was a mask for the truth: she wasn't going to push for the shield to be removed. The words coming out of her mouth now were a political smoke screen, a flood of non-specific reassurances that promised exactly nothing.

Two months ago, she'd supported the idea of freeing adult wilders, and I believed she had meant it. What had changed?

Somebody had gotten to her, and talked her out of it.

How?

Blackmail? It was an absurd possibility, but the first one I could think of. Some kind of leverage, pushing her away from where she wanted to go. Or maybe some of that horse-trading she'd been talking about; maybe they'd offered her something else she really wanted, and she'd sold me out in exchange—never mind that fine story she'd told about her late wife and her lost wilder kid.

My mother would have been able to find out what she'd gotten. But there was no way in hell I was asking my mother for any more help.

Either way, it meant I was on my own. Or rather,
we
were on
our
own. The only people I could rely on in this fight were the other Fiain.

And Liesel,
I reminded myself.
And Robert.

It would have to be enough.

~

That afternoon, while Julian was out grocery shopping, I called Liesel. “Tell me you have some good news.”

I knew she didn't. If her research had turned up anything useful, she would have called me. But the shield was eating at me worse than ever, to the point where I wanted to claw at myself, as if I could rip it off with my fingernails. I was curled up on the couch in order to keep myself from pacing a hole in the carpet, which was how I'd spent too much of my morning.

Even through a screen, Liesel could read my state. Her sympathy and regret were clear. “I'm sorry, Kim. I've been looking, everywhere I can think to. I hoped there would be more in German than there is in English, but there just isn't. It seems our government keeps things just as buttoned up as yours does.”

“You're sure it's censorship from on high?”

“Do I have proof? No. But I can't imagine it's anything else. There are enough academics in the world, studying every psychic subject in existence.
One
of them would have written about this by now.”

I wrapped my arms tighter around my body, trying to contain the ache within. “I don't know what I'm going to do, Liesel. Eventually they'll let me have my gifts back, okay—but that won't fix anything. It'll be just as bad, in a different way. I won't hurt like I do now, but I'll know they can
make
me hurt like this, any time they want.” When I swallowed, it felt like I was choking. I'd vowed not to dump this on Liesel, but with her image on the living room screen, watching me with that compassionate, supportive gaze, I couldn't keep the words back. “I'm afraid it's going to drive me insane. Not metaphorically—
actually insane.
”

“That's a reasonable fear.”

I sat up on the couch, staring at her. “What? No—you're supposed to tell me that it's going to be okay, that it won't be as bad as I think. I don't
want
to hear that I'm right to be afraid.”

Liesel winced. “Lord and Lady, Kim. I'm sorry. I don't mean you're going to turn schizophrenic or anything. It's just . . .” She sighed. “I haven't found anything useful about the shield, but while I've been looking, I've ended up reading a lot of other things. Did you know that if you want to work for the Centers for Wilder Education, you need at least a master's degree in child psychiatry, and have to pass a battery of empathy tests on top of that?”

“No,” I said slowly, “though I guess it makes sense.”

“It does more than make sense. Wilders are raised in an institutional setting, with a small number of people taking care of a relatively large number of children. And they aren't raised like normal children; everything they experience, long before they get to actual psychic training, is aimed at teaching them to self-regulate. To control their emotions and their reactions, to concentrate on the task at hand even when there are distractions all around. That has consequences, you know. Wilders are at high risk for attachment disorders, anxiety, a raft of neuroses—all kinds of problems.

“But it isn't in anybody's best interests for the world's most powerful psychics to be emotionally unstable. So they put a
lot
of effort into making sure wilders are going to be as well adjusted as possible.” Liesel looked both impressed and helpless. “That means employing highly educated empaths to take care of the children's psychological health.”

I shivered. “Are you saying they manipulate the kids?”

“No, I don't think so. Not in the way you mean, anyway. That kind of thing . . . it's unsubtle, and in the long run it isn't very effective. I think they mostly put their effort into sensing problems early on, and then judging how well the treatments are working. I mean, the goal is to have everyone grow up to be a stable, self-regulating adult. You aren't going to get that if you're relying on empathy to shove their emotions in the right direction; they have to learn to do it themselves. Even so—” She paused, clearly wishing she hadn't started that sentence. But Liesel knew me well enough not to think she could get away with stopping there. “Empathy and psychiatry degrees can't make everything perfect.”

I thought about the things I'd seen from the other Fiain, from Julian. The way they depended on one another for human comfort, and the hunger in him after so long without it. His initial attempts to deny his feelings for me, because attachment was too great of a risk. And those were the
small
issues. “He doesn't deal with the shield very well.”

Liesel's eyes went wide. “Kim, he basically had a psychotic break last fall.”

The term made me flinch, but I couldn't really argue with it. After the Unseelie held him prisoner, Julian had more or less gone berserk. At the time I'd chalked it up to the fact that they tortured him . . . but that wouldn't have sent him over the edge if he hadn't been close to begin with. It had been the imprisonment, as much as what they did to him, that caused him to lose control so badly. And that was because of the shield.

My fingers ached, digging hard into my arms. “Are you saying I'm going to end up like he is? The other Fiain aren't.”

“They've probably come to terms with it better than he has. And no, I don't think you will. But it's a
huge
psychological stressor, and that's going to have an effect. That's what I meant a moment ago: not that I think you're going to go insane, but that it's reasonable for you to feel unbalanced from this.” Liesel took a deep breath and smoothed her hair back into a fresh ponytail, as if collecting her thoughts again. “Have they assigned a therapist to you?”

“No.”

“They should,” Liesel said. She put her hands up to stop my next words. “I know, Kim. You don't want them messing around in your head any more than they already have. But they've got specialists, people trained to deal with circumstances a lot like yours. A private therapist isn't going to be as good at helping you come to terms with this.”